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<TITLE>An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation - What this Book Is Not</TITLE>
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<H2><A NAME="SEC6" HREF="schintro_toc.html#SEC6">What this Book Is Not</A></H2>

<P>
This book isn't a language definition for Scheme, or a manual for using
any particular Scheme implementation.  There is a free language definition
document for Scheme, easily available via the internet, called the Revised
Scheme Report.  (There's also an IEEE standard.)  I recommend getting the
Scheme report and printing it out, or browsing the html version with
a web browser.
(<CODE>http://www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository/doc.standards.html</CODE>
It's not very big, because Scheme is a pretty small language.  I also
recommend having a look at the documentation for the particular implementation
of Scheme you're using.

</P>
<P>
On the other hand, this book may serve as a passable approximation
of a language manual most of the time.  (It may work better for this purpose
once it's fleshed out more and I've devised more online indexing.)  It
describes all of the important features of standard Scheme, clearly enough
that you can use them for most purposes.  This is possible because Scheme
is very clean and "orthogonal"---most of its features don't interact in
surprising ways, so if you understand Scheme, and do the "Scheme-ish" thing,
Scheme will generally do what you expect.

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<P>
For more information on Scheme, particular Scheme implementations, and
so on, see the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) List on the usenet newsgroup
<CODE>comp.lang.scheme</CODE>.  It's available from the Scheme Repository
via anonymous internet ftp from <CODE>ftp.cs.indiana.edu</CODE> in the
directory <CODE>pub/scheme-repository</CODE>.  Or if you're a World Wide Web
user, visit the Scheme repository at
<CODE>http://</CODE><CODE>www.cs.indiana.edu/</CODE><CODE>scheme-repository</CODE>.  The Scheme
repository contains several free implementations of Scheme, as well as a
variety of useful programs, libraries, and papers.

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